On Finding and Loving Nameless Creeks

I can be gratified, I suppose, that anyone half my age is thinking about what it means to belong to or in a place and why that matters, taking guidance from the South’s Mr. Wendell Berry.

It is especially a comfort and blessing when that someone who finds his own nameless creek is your son, now living in Missouri. Excerpt below is from Nathan’s blog, People’s Green. Some of you will understand his wondering and wandering and want to read it all.

…I realize that for the first time in a good while, I see relationship here: if not permanence, longevity.

I’m not used to seeing this in the Healing Spots I find.  Often enough I find Truth and Beauty in these places – Sublimity, even.  but never longevity.  Moving as much as I have, with my eye as fixated as it’s been on the Future (always elsewhere), my Healing Spots were places to be, but not to settle.

Wendell Berry would have a thing or two to say to me.  I have no doubt he would have some stern, fatherly words to share about my promiscuity of place these last twenty years – how quick I’ve been to say I “loved” the far-away nooks to which I’ve traveled or the communities I’ve dabbled in for a month or two, a year or two, at a time.   Like Bonhoeffer’s distaste for cheap grace, Berry has suffered little patience for cheap place or its shareholders.